An invitation to Europeans

See Israel's plight

By David Navon

May 8, 2002

HAIFA, Israel If I were Swedish (Dutch, French etc), my view of the Israeli-Arab conflict might well be different from my view of it as an Israeli. I hope, nonetheless, that I would not lose sight of the overall picture.

The dispute has never been restricted to the territories occupied in 1967. Israel held on to most of them as a bargaining chip to attain a peace settlement ending the conflict for good.

The Oslo accords committed Israel to a phased withdrawal in exchange for a Palestinian commitment to relinquish armed struggle. Yet 19 months ago the Palestinians resumed the armed struggle after the Camp David meeting had failed to produce a final settlement.

Had I been Swedish, I might not have automatically accepted the Israeli claim that the outbreak of violence was planned before the Camp David meeting even started, in keeping with the Palestine Liberation Organization's intention to obtain as much as possible by diplomacy and the remainder later by force. Perhaps I might even have understood what led the Palestinians to renege on their commitment.

At the same time, though, I would wonder how Israel could respond to the vicious violence that targets mostly civilians, and the more the better. I think I would endorse the obligation of the Israeli government to protect its citizens as well as to foil and deter attacks.

Would I expect Israel not to try to end this state of mini-war? Consider that the toll of casualties inflicted by terror on the Israeli population in the month of March alone exceeded, relative to the population, the toll of Sept. 11 in the United States. I hope that, even if I were fortunate enough to live in a country which had not been involved in any fighting for years, I would understand that such an expectation was morally unsound. As I might happen to know, the right to self-defense allows the use of necessary force within the conventional rules of war to obtain cessation of violence, including violence having excusable or justifiable motives. If a moderate amount of force fails, it is permissible to use more forceful means in a way that inflicts the minimal harm necessary to attain the end.

As I would probably have heard, fighting often involves some risk for civilians. Such risk is held to be justifiable when the intended effect is morally acceptable, the evil effect is not intended and the actor seeks to minimize it, accepting costs to himself. In keeping with that, the Israel Defense Force has a stringent code of ethics formulated by a team headed by a venerable professor of philosophy.

If I were Swedish, and if any agent tried to have my country yield to an unacceptable demand by thwarting the possibility of conducting normal life all over the country, I would want him to be shown that he had quite a bit to lose if he kept trying.

Alas, the horrible war of attrition inflicted on Israelis and Palestinians for 19 months suits Yasser Arafat. He believes that the worse the situation, the better the chances for attaining his goal - which is, he confided to a former president of Indonesia, "to drive the Jews into the sea."

For him, suicide bombers and human shields are martyrs, not casualties, and the plight of Palestinians is the gas fueling the engine of revolution. He would throw into his holy war many more martyrs to reach his goal. As his slogan goes, "A million martyrs are marching to the Holy City."

Arafat has been led to believe that whatever the Palestinians stand to get at the end is in no way placed at risk by whatever deeds the Palestinians commit in the meantime. With such an insurance policy at hand, he must feel that he has nothing to lose. I want to hope that even if I were Swedish I would not like Arafat having an insurance policy of that sort. I suspect, though, that as a Swede I would rather keep looking for some big carrot, and then for a yet bigger one. As a weary Israeli, however, I have lately become disillusioned with a hundred years' of hope that there is a carrot big enough to make militant Arabs give up their dream of having the Jewish state gradually disintegrate.

They feel that the dream is within reach in a generation or two. The key instrument is indiscriminate terror, aimed at making Israelis feel that their narrow country is no longer a safe place to raise children in.

Being Israeli, I have recently been exposed to sobering facts - more than I had bargained for - supporting the chilling thesis that such is the Palestinian strategy. Those facts are hard to reconcile with the alternative thesis - that Arafat has waged this bloody war just for the 300 square kilometers that Barak insisted on keeping.

Hence, with all due skepticism, I cannot help concluding that my country is fighting for a more vital asset than some tiny percentage of the land occupied in 1967.

I hope that someday my virtual Swedish clone understands that and takes a less forgiving attitude toward Arafat's cynical strategy, and a more understanding one toward Israeli countermeasures. The writer is a professor of psychology at the University of Haifa and a member of the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.

This article was originally published in the International Herald Tribune on May 8, 2002

 

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